On Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 06:15:13PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
On Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 06:58:37PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Aoife Moloney:
>
> > == Detailed Description ==
> > The split between `/bin` and `/sbin` is not useful, and also unused.
>
> Programs in /usr/bin have their documentation in section 1 of the
> manual, while programs /usr/sbin are documented in section 8. (In
> general, I deliberately used /usr/bin/ld.so although the manual page was
> already called ld.so(8), without a program of this name existing.)
>
> When moving programs, should we move the manual pages as well? Or at
> least add a link so that that section 1 references work?
The manual sections have historical meaning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page#Manual_sections
eg.
1 = general commands
8 = system administration
So unless the tools themselves are changing their purpose or are in
the wrong section now, the manual sections should stay the same.
This a very good question and a very good answer ;) Thank you both.
I added this to point to the Feedback section on the wiki.
> Is there something we can do to help developers on Fedora
systems to
> write portable code (not just shell scripts) after this change is rolled
> out?
I don't think so. When considering compatiblity of stuff written
elsewhere and executed on Fedora, this change if anything increases
compatibility, because now both paths are now valid. Going the other
way, if somebody were to hardcode the path used on Fedora, that might
now be different than than in the past and different than some other
distro. But differences in paths already existed (the proposal has a
list), so this method wasn't reliable anyway. I think the correct
solution is not specify fixed paths at all, and just let $PATH do its
job.
Zbyszek